Brion Vibber wrote:
* replace pliny as the database server with a slightly
beefier machine
(eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig ram)
* take the old hard drive _out_ of pliny and set it aside, as it's been
suspected of being a problem
* reassign pliny as the new web server front end
* reassign larousse as the backup server; it could hold both a
replicated database and take over web server duties in a crash emergency
by taking over the other machine's IP address
One thing I like about this plan is that most of it doesn't
involve changing the way things are working.
pliny (dual Athlon 1800) can surely do more than larousse (Pentium III),
so that will likely solve the overloaded webserver problem. Going to
a slightly beefier db server will probably help a lot, too.
Under your setup, presumably the non-English wiki webserving could be
handled by either pliny (dual Athlon 1800) or by the backup (Pentium
III) server? If pliny can do it, that's great, but if not, well,
the backup server should be plenty enough to handle that for now.
The present larousse is overloaded (typical load
average around 8-10
during daytime US, or up to 30 if some ass decides to spider the site
for every printable page), and a lot of pliny's CPU is taken by its
additional web duties (pushing load to around 4).
So in addition to beefy up the db server, we want to also not have
it doing additional web duties at all, right?
More RAM for the database should help it.
More CPU for the web server would definitely help it.
More RAM for the web server should help it once we start making more use
of in-memory caching, which should decrease load on the database (and
decrease the amount of stuff that it has to lock, leading to faster
response times on reads while other operations are running).
Excellent.